Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

     I’d like you to go with me for a minute to another small town in Iowa. It is not that different than any town that dots this state and in fact is very similar to Earlham.

     Driving down the main street we stop and take a look at the store fronts. Buildings that were erected around the turn of the 20^th century by forward thinking progressive businessmen who were proud of their community and brought goods and services in a time when your only other option was a mail order catalog.

     Today most of those buildings sit empty. There was the pharmacy, once a bustling place complete with an old fashioned soda fountain. You didn’t have to worry about not having medicine available to you on short notice. Slowly though, people found that it was easier to buy their medications in the same place they found groceries and soon there wasn’t enough business for the owners to keep the doors open.

     Next door was the clothing store. It once was the place where men and women bought the clothing they needed and where you could get a pair of black dress socks in your size on the way to one of the local churches for a wedding. But it couldn’t keep up with the times, when it was easier to go to a big store many miles away and find the same things cheaper, even if the quality wasn’t as good.

     There was a grocery store. A local place for people to buy their food and to hear the news around town. If you were making cookies for Christmas you could order extra flour and sugar, and if you didn’t use it all most of the time you could return it unopened. It is no wonder it has closed now. It is so much easier to buy your groceries in the same place that you can buy clothing, and pots and pans and tires. No one really misses it I’m sure.

     And there were more empty buildings…restaurants, and lawyers offices, and a doctor and a bank and a gas station where you could have your bicycle tire fixed if you needed to. But all those are gone now too, replaced by some franchise that really gives very little back to the community, but where you can buy a pizza.

     At the end of the street sits an old school building. It too is empty now. It wasn’t that this little town didn’t love their school, but some felt that their kids were better off going elsewhere and they open- enrolled them out. The people of the community also weren’t willing to improve their buildings and staff, because if it was good enough for me, why wouldn’t the same place be good enough for my kids?

     Oh sure, this little town doesn’t seem to be so different from Earlham, and maybe the attitude of people here is a little different. But there is one other business there, that was once the champion of that small town. The place where they took the responsibility of keeping the community informed. Of sharing the joys and sorrows of every day life and leaving a lasting record of the time. The newspaper lived and breathed in that community, and kept the people informed. But people didn’t feel the need for it, didn’t feel that it was an important part of the community. They got angry when the editor printed news that they didn’t want to hear, and decided that their advertising dollars and legals were best printed by the “county” paper that today only runs two very small news items about the community on the 7^th page.

    I suppose though we are lucky to live in a community like Earlham. Where we support our neighbors and businesses by giving them our business and our support. It is fortunate that we don’t have the problems of that other small town, that we will always have store fronts that bustle with activity, bringing tax dollars into our community. Or will we? Only you can decide their fate…and it isn’t something you should take lightly.

See you next week….remember, we’re all in this together.